In 40 years, Title IX revolutionized women's sports, but there's still a ways to go

Sixteen college teams participated in the Women's State College Basketball Tournament in Alex Nemzek Hall
at Moorhead State in February 1975.(Pioneer Press file photo)

While playing basketball at Washington State in the early 1980s, Shelley Patterson paid for her own sports gear, such as shoes and warm-ups. Her team traveled to games in vans.

Meanwhile, players on the WSU men's basketball team traveled mostly by air, wore paid-for gear from head to toe and stretched out in roomier locker rooms before and after games.

"At least I got to play," said Patterson, now an assistant coach for the WNBA champion Minnesota Lynx.

Women get to play. That's at the heart of this weekend's 40th anniversary of Title IX. It was a law that never mentioned sports but drastically impacted the landscape of games by forcing schools to provide equal opportunities for both genders. There has been monumental advancement in the participation of girls and women in athletics in the decades since, but sometimes at the cost of men's sports at the college level. And even now, 40 years later, many colleges and universities still are not compliant with the law.

"Title IX in one generation has altered how we think about female athletes forever," said Mary Jo Kane, University of Minnesota professor in sport sociology and director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport. "Females finally would have access to the same opportunities (as those) for men. That was the key. I think it's fair to say that Title IX built female athletes a ballpark, and they came and excelled in overwhelming numbers."

In 1972, 7.

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4 percent (294,015) of high school athletes were female, according to the Women's Sports Foundation. That number was 41.4 percent (3,173,549) in 2010-11, according to the latest report from the National Federation of State High School Associations.

Forty years ago, fewer than 30,000 women played college sports, and scholarships were scarce. Now there are nearly 200,000 women participating, with 48 percent of them on scholarship at NCAA Division I schools. Still, that doesn't match the fact that almost 60 percent of college students are women, 43 percent of whom are athletes.

Also, female coaches in women's sports have decreased dramatically since Title IX's inception, from holding more than 90 percent of the jobs in 1972 to 43 percent now. There are hundreds more jobs in women's college sports than there were 40 years ago, but the people benefitting most from that increase are men.

"Many of us are a part of marginalized groups -- in some cases more than just being women but being African American or by sexual (orientation)," said Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve, a former Indiana State coach. "If given a choice we get left out.

The Highland Park girls basketball team won the first annual Twin City basketball game in 1975. (Pionner Press file photo)

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HOW THE U COMPLIES

The University of Minnesota had separate men's and women's athletic departments until Joel Maturi was hired as athletics director to merge them in 2002. He did that while making the Gophers Title IX compliant and avoiding the elimination of any sports.

The Office for Civil Rights provided an outline in 1979 to show how schools can prove to be Title IX compliant. The Gophers met the requirement by maintaining female athletic participation proportional to female enrollment at the school, a level most schools do not reach.

The U's student population currently is 52 percent female, with athletes being 53 percent female (498 women, 456 men), according to 2010-11 enrollment.

Track and field and cross-country athletes make up more than half -- 256 -- of the women's total. And many of the cross-country runners are counted three times -- as participants in cross country in the fall, indoor track in the winter and outdoor track in the spring. That accounting sleight of hand used by some universities -- not Minnesota -- was reported in a New York Times expose last year, along with the fact that many runners on those schools' rosters never competed or were later cut from teams.

Maturi, who retired as athletics director and was replaced by Norwood Teague on Monday, June 18, said Gophers runners all competed, and there was no deception going on at his school.

Kathy Lauby of the Richfield Holy
Angels found chewing gum helped
her to relax as she watched her
team play LeSueur in the 1975 finals
of the state high school girls' winter
playdowns at Bloomington Kennedy. (Pioneer Press file photo)

"When you have football with 115 kids, there's no sport on the women's side that rivals that," Maturi said. "Even though we have 13 women's sports and 12 men's sports (at Minnesota), it would be hard to meet that proportionality if not for the women's cross country, track and field, and rowing teams (which has 57 athletes). But nationally, even with the institutions that are not proportional or haven't met the (requirements), I think they've all advanced opportunities for women. That was the purpose of the law."

MEN VS. WOMEN

If Gophers men's basketball coach Tubby Smith flies his team to games, then women's coach Pam Borton flies her team to games, too.

Borton makes sure that she has equal access to the university's courts for practice and workouts, even when it conflicts with the men's schedule. Men's and women's players at the U have comparable locker rooms, video rooms and lounges after a 2007 renovation.

When the concourse walls along the south entrance of Williams Arena were decorated several years ago with prominent basketball players and teams of years past, Borton fought to make sure half of the photographs and memorabilia represented the women's program, which started in 1971-72 under coach Joan Stevenson.

It's not nitpicking, Borton said; it's making sure the law is abided. Borton said all women's teams need to push for equality when it comes to resources.

"I think it has really held a lot of people accountable," Borton said of Title IX. "I think whatever the men get, the women should get. It's a necessity. I think girls and women are as deserving as boys and men. I think there isn't any difference.

"It does come down to money, though."

Participation and equal scholarship opportunities are only two parts of the three prongs of Title IX compliance. The third prong, which covers treatment, is the most complicated because it encompasses 11 different areas, including quality of locker rooms, travel, academic tutoring, recruiting and marketing.

This area of Title IX has contributed to athletic programs falling even deeper into the red. Providing equal benefits while trying to remain competitive in the highly charged football and men's basketball arms race is costly, said Kane. Although Title IX never was intended to pressure universities into cutting men's sports to deal with budget concerns, it has happened. Non-revenue sports such as wrestling, baseball and men's gymnastics have been hit particularly hard by cost-cutting measures.

"I had a conversation with Joel (Maturi) about this a week ago," Kane said. "Even to add a relatively low-cost sport like golf, you're talking $600,000 to $800,000 a year of recurring money on a sport that will never make any money. So, an athletics director has to come up with another $600,000 to $800,000 to add a women's sport or he can cut a men's non-revenue sport and save $600,000 to $800,000 a year. I'm not saying it's an easy choice for an athletics director. But faced with those two choices, they have often chosen to drop a men's sports rather than add a women's sport. And in that sense, I think Title IX has become the scapegoat."

Longtime Gophers wrestling coach J Robinson is known for winning national titles -- and for commenting publicly on his disdain for a particular gender-equity legislation. He was even reprimanded by Maturi in 2002 for using school resources to fight Title IX.

But Maturi understands Robinson's frustration for his sport's well-being, saying it is "the sad part" of the aftermath of the law. Maturi had to eliminate sports during his time as athletics director at Denver and Miami (Ohio).

"That becomes a challenge for athletics directors because in this business climate of athletics, Division I schools are supposed to be somewhat self-sufficient," Maturi said. "We're committed to being equitable and fair. Yet, obviously we have an obligation to the business model that we need to raise revenues so that we can support all of (our) 25 sports (teams)."

A HISTORY LESSON

After graduating from college in 1984, Patterson was shocked when she received a check for more than $200 from the university.

It was the end result of Blair v. Washington State, a case filed in 1979 by the Northwest Women's Law Center in Seattle, arguing that women's sports at the university received inadequate funding and inferior facilities compared to the men's sports.

The lawsuit was filed under the Washington State Equal Rights Amendment, not Title IX. It took years for the court to rule that WSU had discriminated against women's athletics, and it ordered that equal money be allocated for both genders. The Supreme Court later ruled on an appeal to include football's budget to that allotment in 1987, an even bigger statement for gender equity in college sports.

"It was with that check I realized there was something going on," Patterson said. "Now when I look back I say, 'Wow.' I got that check because somebody went out there and decided this was unfair and we need to set it straight."

Former Gophers basketball standout Linda Roberts, the school's career rebounding leader, recalled being on partial scholarship when she arrived as a prized recruit out of St. Paul Central High School in 1977. Her team traveled in caravans to games, while the men's team flew or rode a charter bus.

"It was a big difference from the men and the women," Roberts said, "But it was still like you have an opportunity to be good in your sport as a female. So just to know that we were on a team and competing with other college teams was a plus."

When Title IX became a law, Roberts was in middle school. It wasn't until later that she noticed the boys received special treatment. She would sit in front of the television and watch the boys high school state tournament being played at Met Center.

"Just seeing what they had to offer for boys ... It wasn't really about being upset, but I couldn't understand why we couldn't do this," she said.

A few years later, in 1976, Roberts played in the first girls high school basketball state tournament, leading Central to the championship.

"When they came and told us we were going to have (a state tournament), I was like, 'Wow! That's great!' That was always a goal for us," she said.

Ever since, young girls in Minnesota have been able to attend high school state tournaments and be inspired to play at that level. Local stars emerged -- such as Lindsay Whalen, who attracted more fans than ever to Gophers games while leading them to the NCAA's Final Four in 2004.

Whalen and the Lynx also sparked the WNBA's popularity while packing Target Center during their championship run last season, while still building interest with an 12-1 record this season.

Their success would not be possible without Title IX, something Lynx players realize and preach to younger generations.

"Yeah, it's great to play in the WNBA," Lynx forward Taj McWilliams-Franklin said. "But can you imagine when we weren't even allowed to play in college? You look at Brittany Griner, Candace Parker and Maya Moore -- the last five or six greatest players to come out of college -- and you think there were no Maya Moores in college before 1970."

At the Athena Awards Banquet in April, Reeve spoke to the female high school seniors who were honored for their athletic and academic achievements.

She shared stories about legendary, recently retired Tennessee women's basketball coach Pat Summit driving the van carrying her team to a game, coaching the game and then sleeping alongside her players overnight on a gym floor. That's what that generation of women athletes did to be in the game.

It was a harsh reminder of how far women's sports have come.

"I talked to them about how fortunate we are because of Title IX," Reeve said. "At the same time, we want to be careful to not take anything for granted, because we still have a long way to go."